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Building and maintaining a brand is not an easy task. One of the key ways to maintain a brand, is analyzing your content; figuring out what has worked and what hasn't worked for your brand. It is arguably the hardest step for maintaining a brand, and often a step most people do not know how to successfully accomplish. While there are many tools to help you understand your analytics on social sites, another way to find out what works for your brand and what doesn't, is to look at your competitors.

It may seem like an odd concept, to seek out ways to improve your brand through your competitors. However, it is an extremely efficient way to see how various tactics work for your target audience. If you look at your direct competitors, the companies who do exactly what you do, it is safe to assume that you share a great portion of your target audience. It is also safe to assume that your company has the potential to attract the same audience that competitor already has attracted who may not be aware of your company yet. Therefore, it is important to analyze the work they do.

Chances are you will find very similar tactics between your company and your competitors. The key to finding success through your competitors is by doing what they do, but doing it better. If you find that your competitor is using a social site to a greater advantage than you are, then you need to focus on learning from them and then using it even better.

We often spend a lot of our time investigating what platforms or content will better resonate with our target audience. Analyzing what has worked for your competitors makes this investigation a little easier. Not only can you compare what is working with your own company, but you can also see what's working for your competitors. Once you know what works, you can spend more time focusing on innovating your content.

If we know that Facebook is working for your competitor to attract your target audience, you no longer have to focus on different social sites; you can immediately shift your focus to improving your content on Facebook. If we know that your target audience responds well to promotional content from your competitor, you can focus on innovating your promotional content so it is better than your competitor's content.

Analyzing the response from your company's content and overall brand image is the only way to ensure you are resonating with your target audience. You should always aim to add value to your brand and make it unique and recognizable. This becomes an easier task when you have multiple sets of data to analyze.